As our customers continue to expand their use of cloud, they are naturally increasing their expectations for how this solution can make a direct and fundamental impact on both their IT organization and their business. Just three months after first making VMware CloudTM on AWS available to customers, we’re proud to deliver a significant expansion to this service. The scope of our latest release and the speed at which VMware and AWS have brought it to market are testament to our commitment to continuously deliver value to our customers through this solution.
One of the most pervasive requests from VMware customers has been to deliver a cloud environment that offers the optimal performance, scale, reliability and security to support business-critical applications in production. Rightfully so, customers want to know that leveraging the cloud for their most essential applications – those directly tied to revenue generation, customer retention and business operations – means that the best practices trusted to support these applications in the data center will be maintained no matter where that application is deployed. Simply put, customers need the confidence that extending to the cloud means extending the SLAs, processes and standards that protect these applications as well.
To date, customers have faced a difficult choice when evaluating the natural advantages of cloud computing against a backdrop of tradeoffs and concerns for how applications would be supported in production once migrated. A variety of cloud architectures, along with inconsistencies in tools, processes and management platforms, meant that established practices for business continuity, disaster recovery, and more would need to be revised or adapted. At a minimum, this introduced inefficiencies. At worst, this could impact critical business operations. While customers wanted the flexibility to run any application either in the data center or in the cloud, they understood that inconsistencies between the two environments needed to be factored in to which applications could be migrated. Even with clear advantages of cloud computing, many customers chose to delay the migration of mission critical applications.
With the latest update to VMware Cloud on AWS, we’re allowing customers to access the advantages of cloud computing along with the same trusted platforms and solutions that have protected mission-critical applications at scale within their data center. Today we announced a new release of VMware Cloud on AWS making it even easier for customers to move, run and protect mission-critical applications at scale. We accomplish this through a broad range of new capabilities and innovation, jointly engineered with AWS.
In the latest release of VMware Cloud on AWS, we’ve added a new region, AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia, expanded support for AWS services and expanded the scale, network connectivity and security capabilities to support the requirements of mission-critical and cloud-native applications. We’ve also introduced VMware Site RecoveryTM, a new service for VMware Cloud on AWS customers that delivers flexible protection between private data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS, or between environments running in separate AWS Availability Zones, without the need to re-architect applications. This is a cost-effective, streamlined solution that increases disaster readiness and provides robust protection for mission critical applications.
At the same time, we’re making it faster and easier for customers to do large-scale, bulk migrations of applications to the cloud through VMware Hybrid Cloud ExtensionTM, while giving customers greater flexibility in where those workloads are deployed with the addition of VMware vMotion®, L2 stretched networking and AWS Direct Connect.
Today’s release also extends a hallmark of VMware Cloud by providing a consistent infrastructure environment between our customers’ on-premises data center and the cloud – eliminating incompatibilities between the two environments, boosting interoperability and minimizing the amount of rework needed to migrate applications between the data center and the cloud. We’ve also extended a consistent operational model for how cloud environments are managed, enabling IT to leverage proven and existing policies, practices and tools for visibility, operations, automation, security and governance between their VMware based data center and VMware Cloud on AWS.
Improved Economics and Lower TCO versus Traditional Data Center Environments
To make VMware Cloud on AWS even more attractive, we’re adding new one-year and three-year subscription pricing options to complement our existing hourly on-demand pricing. These new subscription options help customers lower TCO by up to 50 percent compared to on-demand pricing. This gives customers a path to significantly lower total cost of ownership compared to traditional data center deployments.
These are just a sample of the incredible innovations featured in today’s release. As a whole, today’s announcement gives customers the key capabilities required to migrate the broadest range of applications – even those most strategic to the success of the business – to the cloud, with increased speed and flexibility, without re-writing or re-architecting applications and without impacting application uptime. We think this creates new opportunities for customers to gain even greater value from cloud computing. Complete details on the latest release of VMware Cloud on AWS can be found here.
Expanding the VMware Cloud on AWS Partner Ecosystem
VMware Cloud on AWS is a great foundation for our customers as well as our partners. Today there are more than 40 technology solutions available for VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware has also added Atos, Cognizant, HCL and Wipro to a growing list of System Integrators/System Outsources (SI/SOs) that will expand their VMware SDDC-based service offerings across private, managed, public and hybrid cloud, and create differentiation through new high value service offerings. And with the addition of support for AWS Direct Connect, customers will benefit from the more than 60 AWS Direct Connect partners offering services.
